Well, what happens then is that the ‘spurned’ allies walk away from the US. The fact that Trump hasn’t yet replaced many of the diplomats he fired (or who resigned) after taking office hasn’t helped stop this trend, to the contrary. Heck, even US officials abroad complain about the lack of knowledgeable officials with sufficient authority in US diplomatic ranks to discuss important and time-sensitive issues with. This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon with Presidential transitions, but one that clearly aggravates various other problems of the current Administration.
Trump is running into a fundamental limitation of his policy. He doesn't hire people based on their knowledge and experience, his primary criteria is finding people that either agree with him or will follow instructions without question. (this requirement is incompatible with hiring based on knowledge/experience) Until now he's been replacing positions of authority and power here at home. When Trump dictates a policy, it just gets repeated by the yes-man he's hired, and those under him have to follow the new policy. That works fine (for him) in a pyramid-shaped system. Yes, it introduces incredible dysfunction in the system, but the wheels continue to turn, if even they head you off in completely the wrong direction. ("progress", but not the sort we like to see!)
This process doesn't work for diplomats. A big part of a diplomat's job is to negotiate with people. They can't just say "my boss said we do xyz, so YOU have to do xyz!" If you try that they will tell you to to get lost, and walk away from the table, and you have failed at your job. Maybe a few will bow to your demands, but for the most part they will laugh you out of their office. Trump just refuses to deal with people that he's forced to compromise with, and so he has no chance of finding an acceptable diplomat to post anywhere.
For the moment he's something of a dictator, but he's OUR dictator, and the rest of the world is just going to tell him to go pound sand. Trump doesn't tolerate people that can't get things done (which i suppose is a good quality?) and seems to recognize that it's a waste of time to fein negotiation, so I don't expect to see any of our resigning diplomats get replaced while he's still in office. No self-respecting diplomat would take the job, because it would be impossible (for anyone) to be an effective diplomat following his rules.
I foresee a mirror of this chaos when his term is over. There's going to be a great ruckus in the campaigning as to "who has the best / fastest plan to fix all the damage that happened over the last four years". Expect to hear a lot of that in 2019. On a normal election year, for the most part, partisan swap-outs don't go TOO overboard on a new administration. You'll see some of it of course, but the new head honcho is usually smart enough to realize "I don't like that guy and we don't see eye to eye, but he's doing a really good job and I'd be a fool to replace him", and so at least some measure of continuity remains between terms. BUT.... with Trump flushing/chasing so many people out the door, the backwash that results in 2020 is bound to be strongly partisan, and that's REALLY going to raise the stakes. It's not a matter of "Do I really want to replace this jerk that's doing a good job?", it's more like "I need to find bodies to replace all the incompetent morons surrounding me!" Expect to see a very conservative or moderate government emerge from the chaos, something that will have the usual back-and-forth oscillation for years (or decades?) to come before the waters finally calm back down a bit.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
